I have been seriously considering switching this blog from the blogging platform WordPress to the Ghost platform. Ghost has a number of advantages over WordPress: it’s faster, more modern, more customizable, and less dependent on third-party plugins (which can break or stop being updated.) Plus, learning to customize it would involve learning more Javascript—something I want to do anyway—instead of learning more PHP—something I have no desire to do.

However, Ghost has a very serious flaw, a flaw so big that it’s put me off the platform entirely (at least for now): Ghost doesn’t support comments.

This is not an oversight, or a feature that they haven’t gotten around to. It’s a conscious decision. Ghost has a “wishlist” page where users can request new features be added, and other users can vote. As of this writing, the top thirty-two ideas are all either “started”, “planned”, or “under review”—all thirty-two ideas except comments, that is. Even though support for comments is the fifth most requested feature, it is not a feature that the Ghost team plans to implement any time soon.

John O’Nolan, the founder of Ghost has this to say:

At present we have no plans to add native commenting to Ghost. There are tons of options out there from Disqus, Livefyre, Facebook, Google Plus and IntenseDebate to name just a few. All of them have already built very comprehensive products which are used by most of the biggest sites in the world.

Definitely still interested in hearing comments about any other use-cases, though!

That is, he thinks that users should just use Disqus, Facebook comments, or one of the other third-party services that host comments. I have no intention of doing so, but don’t have any illusions that the decision of a single blogger is likely to change their mind about supporting comments. Instead, I’m going to focus on the last sentence: he’s “interested in hearing comments about any other use cases.”

I’m going to take John up on this offer. But I’m going to argue that not only is there a use case for Ghost that would benefit from comments, actually all three of the most common use cases for Ghost would benefit from comment support. In fact, I believe that the lack of comment support is the single largest factor holding Ghost back.

James Damore, the author of the notorious Google memo, has had his 15 minutes of fame. In six months, few of us will be able to remember his name. But Google will remember — not the company, but the search engine. For the rest of his life, every time he meets someone new or applies for a job, the first thing they will learn about him, and probably the only thing, is that he wrote a document that caused an internet uproar.

The internet did not invent the public relations disaster, or the summary firing to make said disaster go away. What the internet changed is the scale of the disasters, and the number of people who are vulnerable to them, and the cold implacable permanence of the wreckage they leave behind….

[After] the memo became public, the internet erupted against the author, quite publicly executing his economic and social prospects. I doubt Damore will ever again be employable at anything resembling his old salary and status. (Unless maybe a supporter hires him to make a political statement.)

I think McCardle vastly overestimates how economically damaging online mobs are. I think that people are very afraid of online mobs—just like people are afraid of terrorists or shark attacks. But I also think that, as with terrorists or shark attacks, people are more afraid of mobs than the statistics justify. And, as with those other dangers, it’s important to remember how low the risk is, so that we don’t overreact and adopt cures that are worse than the disease. (Which is not to say that we shouldn’t look for cure that aren’t worse that the disease in any of those areas, to the extent that we can find them.)[FN: I hope it goes without saying that I am not drawing any sort of moral equivalence between terrorists, sharks, and/or online mobs.]

* * *

Lets start with the specific case McCardle highlighted. Is it true that Damore’s economic prospects were severely harmed by his encounter with an online mob?

Note: I am very specifically staying out of the merits of the Damore issue. I kind of wish McCardle had picked a different example, but she picked that one, so I’ll stick with it. I do have Thoughts about the whole Google memo situation, but it’s a big topic and not one I’m interested in getting into right now. Right now, I’m limiting my discussion to a narrow topic: given that Damore was fired and faced the controversy that he faced, will his economic prospects be significantly harmed?

Now, maybe all this falls into the category that McArdle parenthetically dismisses by saying that he’ll never get as good a job “(unless maybe a supporter hires him to make a political statement.)” But so what if he gets hired to make a political point? The harm he’s experiencing is that he’s not getting hired by people who want to avoid making a political point. Politically motivated money spends just the same as any other money; the overall point is that economically speaking Damore doesn’t seem to have been harmed by the internet mob.

* * *

Well, ok, maybe McArdle was wrong about that Google guy, but surely she’s right that in general being targeted by a rabid online mob is very economically harmful? After all, most people who are targeted by online mobs don’t have supporters who raise tens of thousands of dollars on their behalf.

Again, I disagree.

I think people who are targeted by online mobs mostly fall into one of two logical categories. First, they might be like the Google guy, and do something that is very controversial. In that case, they will have supporters (or else there would be no controversy). And, in general, these supporters will help them out enough that the controversy won’t be (economically) crushing.

Damore obviously falls into this category. So do Monica Lewinsky and Anita Hill—both of whom were vilified but both of whom seem to be doing fine these days. Sure, not everyone has fund raisers, but in general being on one side of a highly charged controversy is not a death sentence; you have lots of enemies, but you also have lots of friends.

The other alternative is that the target of the online mob does something that isn’t controversial—it’s just criticized. In that situation, the target doesn’t get any support at all.

Yet I still don’t think being the target of an online mob in that situation is all that economically damaging. If the event isn’t controversial, then there’s no ongoing debate to keep people interested, and the short attention span of Twitter all but guarantees that the target will be left alone soon—and will be able to recover in short order.

Here, my go-to example is Justine Sacco. Sacco is the lead example in Jon Ronson’s excellent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Ronson writes about how Sacco became the target of an online mob based on a joke she made on Twitter. She was promptly fired from her public relations job, and received basically no support at all. Even now, Googling her name brings up story after story about her twitter joke.

Her tweet had been taken out of her little bubble and robbed of its context, [but] was it really worth ruining her life over?

Fortunately, while it took a very long time, Sacco did eventually pick herself back up, but not before some setbacks. After spending some time working in Ethiopia, she took a job as the PR person for Hot or Not, and after doing so, [the person who started the online mob] struck again. “How perfect!” he wrote. “Two lousy has-beens, gunning for a comeback together.”

But the story has a happy — and just — ending. Not long after [that guy] mocked Sacco again, he got a taste of his own medicine when an ironic tweet of his own was taken out of context, and he (and his editors) ended up getting hundreds of emails demanding that he be fired. Ultimately, he would not only apologize to Sacco for ruining her life, but they actually ended up going out to dinner together and becoming good friends.

In fact, Biddle suggested in his apology that no one is more qualified as a PR person than Sacco. “She has the expertise of ten lifetimes when it comes to dealing with bad press. She survived a genuine personal crisis. She’s unkillable, and smart, and she will tell you to shut up, idiot, it can’t get any worse.”

Sacco eventually found a good job in a PR firm that she loves, although she wouldn’t identify where she works to the Times because, as she told Ronson, “Anything that puts the spotlight on me is a negative.”

Consistent with its headline, that story really plays up the “ruining her life” angle. But did it really? That article was written less than five years after the initial tweet, and Sacco had already had her new good job for quite some time. (She actually got a job after just a year). So, in just a few years, she’d recovered completely and, in the long run, seems to be in a similar economic position to where she was before the mob.

Now, the fact that Justine Sacco didn’t suffer long-run economic consequences from her mobbing run is not proof that others don’t. But it is pretty indicative. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed presumably chose her as its lead example for a reason—if there were others who suffered worse consequences, it stands to reason that they would have been the lead example. Plus, a bit of Googling hasn’t revealed any proof of people who were economically crushed by twitter mobs. (And that’s coming from an Internet that provides example after example of 20 lottery winners who lost every penny and the like!)

It’s always hard to prove a negative, but given the lack of evidence and the inherently public nature of public shaming, I’m convinced that the odds of it being significantly economically harmful are very low.

* * *

Does all this mean that I’m prepared to embrace public shaming as a harmless feature of modern life? Not at all.

As you may have noticed, I’ve qualified all of the above by limiting the discussion to economic harms. Public shaming can obviously be deeply unpleasant, even traumatic. What’s more, it frequently seems mean, guided by some of the worst human instincts.

Even worse, I suspect it is anti-correlated with the truth. In an ideal world, we’d debate ideas in a way that brings us closer to the truth—sure, people can make arguments for both good ideas and for bad ideas, but the good ideas have a natural advantage and will hopefully win over time.

At best, public shaming lacks this feature: whether a public shaming campaign is successful depends not on the truth of the issues under debate, but on the social capital, personal connections, and wealth of the people involved. A public shaming campaign against the Koch brothers or George Sorros will have almost no effect; a shaming campaign against someone like Sacco with a stable family and enough savings to travel to Ethiopia for a while will have a minor, temporary effect; and a public shaming campaign aginst poor teenager suffering from mental health issues could lead to depression or suicide. I have no interest in promoting a weapon that can be used so much more effectively against the powerless than against the powerful.

If I’m still against public shaming, why does it matter that the economic consequences aren’t as bad as McArdle and others seem to think? Simply because people are afraid. People really do “live in fear” as McArdle put it; they do think that an online mob can “ruin their life.” This is probably mistaken; an online mob can make life tough for a while, but any targets will likely either have some supporters or will be able to bounce back fairly quickly. Without minimizing the very real suffering online mobs can cause, I want to urge everyone to be just a bit less afraid.

This post is a bit inside baseball for the rationalist community, but I promise to provide enough context for everyone else to follow the argument.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is wrong about Quidditch. He’s wrong on an object level. He’s wrong on a meta level. And the way he’s wrong on the meta level perfectly encapsulates a frequent rationalist failure mode.

Let’s back up and take in some context: Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the most prominent members of the rationalist community and did quite a bit of blogging/writing at Less Wrong on the ways to become more rational. Among many other posts, he wrote rationality is systematized winning, which argued that “if the ‘irrational’ agent is outcompeting you on a systematic and predictable basis, then it is time to reconsider what you think is ‘rational'”.

By this standard, what Yudkowsky has to say about Quidditch isn’t rational—that is, Yudkowsky uses a flawed system, and the flaws in that system resulted in bad predictions—and will continue to lead to the same error in future predictions.

So, what did Yudkowsky say about Quidditch as depicted in the Harry Potter books? In writing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Yudkowsky repeatedly returns to the “irrationality” of Quidditch as it is portrayed in the cannon Harry Potter books.[FN: Note that, in this post, I am attributing views expressed by a character in HPMoR to the author of HPMoR. I don’t endorse that as a general practice. In general, the author of a work of fiction need not, and likely does not, endorse the views of characters in that work. However, based on the totality of Yudkowsky’s writings, I strongly believe that he does endorse Harry Potter’s views of Quidditch. If anyone disagrees, I’m happy to debate the issue in the comments.]

Yudkowsky has Harry express his views early on. Harry has the following exchange with Ron:

“Catching the Snitch is worth one hundred and fifty points? ”

“Yeah -”

“How many ten-point goals does one side usually score not counting the Snitch?”

“Um, maybe fifteen or twenty in professional games -”

“That’s just wrong. That violates every possible rule of game design. Look, the rest of this game sounds like it might make sense, sort of, for a sport I mean, but you’re basically saying that catching the Snitch overwhelms almost any ordinary point spread. The two Seekers are up there flying around looking for the Snitch and usually not interacting with anyone else, spotting the Snitch first is going to be mostly luck -“

“That’s not interactive, there’s no back-and-forth with the other player and how much fun is it to watch someone incredibly good at moving their eyes? And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else’s work moot. It’s like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King’s idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn’t understand the rules?” Actually, now that Harry thought about it, that seemed like a surprisingly good hypothesis. Put him on a broomstick and tell him to catch the shiny thing…

Ron’s face pulled into a scowl. “If you don’t like Quidditch, you don’t have to make fun of it!”

“If you can’t criticise, you can’t optimise. I’m suggesting how to improve the game. And it’s very simple. Get rid of the Snitch.”

So, within seconds of learning the rules, Harry has diagnosed a key flaw in Quidditch. And this isn’t a passing observation; he returns to this issue over and over again. He even uses it as a sort of shorthand for rational thinking as a whole; for example, Harry praises another character by saying, “he’s the only other person I know who notices stuff like the Snitch ruining Quidditch.”

There’s a story about Justice Hugo Black that I really like.[FN: I can’t find the source for this story online; if anyone knows it, please let me know and I’ll edit it in. All quotes below are from memory and thus are likely not exact.] For context, you should know that Justice Black was famously principled—respected, even by his ideological opponents on the Supreme Court, for his intellectual consistency.

With that context, a journalist interviewing Justice Black late in his life asked, “Justice Black, while serving on the Supreme Court, did you ever reach an unprincipled decision? And do you regret it?”

Without hesitation, Justice Black answered, “I did, and I don’t regret it. The Court had just decided Brown v. Board, which struck down school segregation for a very principled reason—the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to provide ‘equal protection of the laws’ to all people, and segregated public schools were inherently unequal. But right after Brown, we were confronted with a problem: What about public schools in Washington D.C.?”

“The Fourteenth Amendment only applies to states, so the principled answer would be to say that Brown v. Board did not apply to D.C. But that would have been a terrible outcome—we would have looked like huge hypocrites, saying that all schools should be integrated except for the one set of schools that our kids (and the kids of other politicians) would go to. It would have looked awful, and it would have been a huge setback for civil rights.”

“So, as a companion case to Brown, we unanimously decided Bolling v. Sharpe, which held that D.C. schools must be integrated. We didn’t have equal protection to truly justify our decision, and so we reached for a justification involving due process instead—and ended up with a decision that legal scholars describe as ‘very difficult to reconcile with the text of the Constitution.'”

“In short, we reached an unprincipled decision, and I don’t regret it at all.”

I admire Justice Black for his votes in Brown and Bolling and for his honesty in acknowledging that Bolling was not a principled decision.

* * *

I’ve been thinking a lot about this Justice Black story lately, because I think it captures something essential. It genuinely is important to have principles, and to stand on principle. It’s also, however, important to make exceptions to those principles, and not to follow them off a cliff.

Perhaps most important, though, is to honestly acknowledge that you are betraying your principle, that you are making an unprincipled exception. When you’re open about that, you can weigh up the costs and benefits of making the exception. You can, like Justice Black, decide that the unprincipled exception is worth it in these special circumstances—while acknowledging that making the exception one time weakens the principle going forward, and that this is a real cost.

Doing that, however, is really hard. It hurts to acknowledge that you’re breaking your own principles, that you are making an exception, that you’re weakening the principle that’s dear to you. It’s much easier—and certainly much more psychologically comfortable—to twist and bend your principle until you can come up with some justification for why your actions fit with that principle. To come up with some sort of story—some lie—about how you’re really following your principle after all.

The problem with that comfortable lie, however, is that it weakens the principle far more than making an honest unprincipled exception would have. Instead of a firm principle with one (or a few) unprincipled exceptions, you’re left with a twisted principle, and one that is probably even more flexible in the future.

People talk about robots coming for their jobs quite a bit. It’s a big topic, and I have thoughts about a few different aspects of it. But, for today, I want to focus on a particular logical error I see smart people making all the time.

Thinking about robots replacing people one at a time

If you are a human employed at an investment bank and worried that robots are coming for your job, I recommend that story about UBS AG’s forays into artificial intelligence, which I found extremely soothing. There are two products involved. One is a boring office-automation thingy, which “scans for emails sent by clients detailing how they want to divide large block trades up between funds” and then does the dividing, “doing a task that would normally take a person about 45 minutes in only about two minutes.” Yeah look no one is losing their job over that; that is a pure win for the junior person who would otherwise have been doing that allocating.

Now, Matt Levine is a smart guy, and his posts are often very insightful (seriously, read his blog). But this last sentence is a perfect example of the flawed thinking I have in mind. The implied claim is that if a robot can’t replace 100% of a particular job (or at least a very large fraction of that job), then “no one is losing their job” because of that robot.

I hope that my last post convinced you to use two spaces after periods in your finished work product—which aids in clarity and makes your writing much more skimmable. But in case you aren’t convinced, I want to make a weaker point—and one that I feel more strongly about.

Even if you don’t think your finished product should use wide sentence spacing, you should still draft with two spaces between your sentences.

Why should you draft with a different number of spaces than you ultimately display? For two reasons: First, there’s a good chance that you should be writing in a plaintext editor. For one thing, separation of presentation and content is a basic principle of visual design, especially on the web. Even for print media, there are real advantages to using a plaintext editor that separates your content from presentation (like LaTex) instead of a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor (like Word).

The full argument for plaintext editors could easily be its own post (orseveraldifferentposts), but here’s the short version: First, it lets you write in a distraction-free writing environment, including one of the many minimalist text editors. All of these editors keep the presentation and styling elements entirely out of the way, letting you focus entirely on the content when you’re first writing. And then they make it easy to go back and apply powerful styling techniques later on.

That segues nicely into the second advantage of writing in a plaintext editor. When you do turn to formatting your text, you can apply more powerful formatting techniques, without the constraints imposed by Word or other word processors. Word tends to be “opinionated”—that is, it imposes lots of views about how your text should be presented. If you agree with those views, fine, but if you don’t … well, it can be hard or impossible to change them.

Finally, first drafting your writing in a plaintext editor makes your writing more flexible and modular. As anyone who’s ever written a document in Word, and then tried to convert that document into a Pages file, a PDF, an email, or an HTML file can tell you, formatting can easily be lost or garbled in the conversion process. (And let’s not even get started on the bad-old-days problem of Word versus WordPerfect.) But with plaintext, you can easily export the text to whatever format you want, and then apply format-appropriate styling once you’ve exported the text.

Have you heard of meta-contrarians? The idea is that in many different areas, there’s a boring, old-fashioned, “common-sense” position. And a popular contrarian rejection of that position. And then a meta-contrarian rejection-of-that-rejection—a rejection that can end up looking a lot like the original position.

The theory is that some people will be strongly drawn to the meta-contrarian position, as a way of countersignalling.FN 1Note that this doesn’t imply anything about the truth of any of the three positions. It’s a theory about which positions people will find *psychologically* appealing, which could have positive, negative, or zero correlation with which positions are true. I don’t know how true this is in general, but it’s an accurate description of me—I feel a strong urge towards meta-contrarianism. Whenever there’s a dominant contrarian position, I feel powerfully drawn to the meta-contrarian position on the other side.

And thus, I have meta-contrarian tendencies in typography.

I. A Typographic Typology

Typography provides fertile soil for meta-contrarianism, because it has so many orthodox contrarian positions. That is, there are many, many common “mistakes” (using hyphens instead of dashes, using the default font, use of too little whitespace, and on and on). This creates an opportunity for contrarians to rush in and correct those errors—which, in turn, presents an opportunity for meta-contrarians to show up and challenge the contrarian orthodoxy.

I think I’ve found my nominee for the most important chart no one talks about: The difference between sticker price of college and average price net of financial aid. Over the last 20 years, tuition at a private college has shot up by almost $15,000—and everyone talks about that. What doesn’t get anywhere near as much attention is that financial aid has shot up almost as much. So, for the average student, the actual cost of private college has only increased by less than $2,500. Put another way: well over four-fifths of the tuition increases in the last 20 years have gone to increases in financial aid.

The story for public colleges is broadly similar, though all the numbers are lower. Sticker tuition has gone up about $5,000, while average tuition has barely increased at all.

This data puts changes in tuition in an entirely different light: as with a store that doubles its prices and then announces that everything is 60% off, the change in tuition has not been as dramatic as it appears.

However, this view is a bit incomplete; the difference—the crucial difference—is that everyone gets the 60% off at the store while the question of who gets the financial aid is much more complex. Indeed, the better analogy is to Barnes & Noble doubling their prices but then announcing much larger discounts for those with loyalty cards: the average price paid may remain similar, but the shift in who is paying what has changed dramatically.

I’ve been thinking for a while about why anger is so politically popular right now, on both the left (Sanders) and the right (Trump etc.)—even though the country as a whole seems to be doing pretty well (low unemployment, low inflation, low crime, not really at war …). It almost seems like most people think that, despite those good numbers, the group they’re part of is at real risk of being left behind. There wouldn’t be any mystery if just a few groups felt that way, but the weird part is that pretty much all groups seem to feel that way at the same time.

Last time, we were talking about how clear legal briefs are and how confusing contracts are in comparison. This is odd, since legal briefs are written to be read by experts (other lawyers), while (many) contracts are written to be read by regular Joes. At the end of the post, I promised that the answer to that question isn’t just important for legal writing. Instead, it has a real impact on something much closer to home: blogging.

Blogs as briefs, blogs as contracts

A blog can be more like a brief, or it can be more like a contract. That is, a blog can be written with the goal of being understood, or written with the goal of writing something that no one can misconstrue.

(Or it can have both those goals, but my point is that they trade off against each other. The more energy a blogger puts into pursuing one objective, the worse they’ll do on the other. It’s a spectrum, not a binary choice. But there’s still a tradeoff.)

I believe too many blogs are written too much like contracts—even those written by the best of bloggers.

What does it mean for a blog to be written like a contract? After all, no one writes a blog in the unreadable format of a credit-card agreement—at least not a blog that people read for long.FN 1More than once, really.

But there is a blog equivalent to writing an unreadable contract. Remember my theory: contracts are unreadable because they aren’t written just for the readers, they’re also written defensively. They’re written to defend against the attacks of the other lawyers who might come along and aggressively/intentionally misread it.